Sunday, 21 October 2012

The Forbidden City

It is the Holy Grail of every bachelor on a
night out to locate the Forbidden City; the venue of choice, where the gender
imbalance is wildly in a man’s favour.Last night The Spear gained access to the Forbidden City for the very
reasonable price of $8 (with no wait in line).

The Spear has previously visited smaller
venues with a noticeably skewed ‘ratio’ - Forbidden Towns, so to speak - but
this was the first time he had come across the bona fide incarnation of the legend
of yore. And for some reason, he thinks
it will be a long time before he stumbles upon it again.

The early signs were good. Upon walking to the entrance of the Forbidden
City, The Spear was flanked by a group of drunken girls in a rainbow of
miniskirts, whereupon they informed him that the bouncer was “letting in too
many drunk sluts”. The Spear is usually not
one to empathise with bouncers on matters of opinion, but in this instance he
decided it was best to trust the bouncer’s professional judgment in the execution
of entry criteria.

Upon walking up the entry stairway to the
venue proper, The Spear passed not one, but two groups of Hens; clusters of
women in white, forming guards of honour around their respective brides to be. If The Spear wasn’t mistaken it was also the
birthday of one of the hens. The planets
were aligning, and still not a man in sight.

When The Spear finally reached the main
bar/lounge area, he had a mind to check whether he had inadvertently gained entry
to a Lesbian bar. It was, hands down,
the most lopsided ‘ratio’ The Spear had ever seen; hundreds and hundreds of
women of every way, shape and form, milling about in a veritable ocean of high-heels,
high-lights and high-pitched voices. There
were maybe 50 gents, max; all with stupid grins on their faces. Venus had passed through the third phase of Saturn. The Spear had been issued a temporary visa to
the Forbidden City.

Once he had finished hyper-ventilating and
regaining the use of his Motor Functions, The Spear said a small prayer of
thanks, wiped away the formation of a tear and began the oft-misunderstood art
form commonly known as ‘mingling’. And -
as a Spear is wont to do - he observed.

For the first half hour or so it was not a
case of spotting the available women, but rather trying to squeeze in between
them at the bar in order to procure a humble beer in the midst of a cocktail-frenzy. With every passing minute the skirts seemed
to be getting shorter, and the faces - more symmetrical. The beer also seemed to be getting cheaper
(perhaps in a vain pursuit to attract more men?). By the end of the first hour, the ugliest guy
in the bar was making out with a passable supermodel. In the Forbidden City, even the most woeful of
cricketers can bat far above his average.

The Spear avoided the dance-floor all
together, in fear that if he entered, he may never return. Several other wise - yet jiggy - men,
resorted to starting their own dance-floor separated from the seething female
mass by a physical barrier, for their own protection. There were so many women on the dance-floor in
fact, that their very density precluded the infiltration of the knee-bobbing,
dirty-dancing throng, by all but the slimmest and most versatile of men. The Spear was neither.

Typically, a group of women at any venue
The Spear frequents is, in due course, surrounded by a circle of hopeful
men. Not so in the Forbidden City. Even at the onset of the early hours of the
morning, groups of stunning women were left untended, leaving in disillusionment,
only to be replaced by yet another group of giggling girls. By the end of the night, even ‘security’ had
been conscripted into action to combat the shortfall of manpower. Every person with the faintest whiff of a Y
chromosome was fair game.

Unfortunately, as The Spear’s prior experiences
with Forbidden Towns have led him to believe, the Forbidden City is not a
consistent phenomenon. The same venue on
different nights can have widely deviating atmospheres. The Forbidden City is not a particular venue;
it is merely a very preferential alignment of circumstances outside of any
individual man’s control. It cannot be
anticipated, and it cannot be planned for.
But however elusive it may be, that is not to say that it is not worth
looking for.